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The report abuse button is not much use when someone is being targeted like CCP, how can she individually reports 10’s/100’s of people and tweets? It would be exhausting. If you report a tweet or a tweep to Twitter and they didn’t target you the response is to get the person being bullied to submit the report or they’ll ignore it. Either this needs to change or they need better solutions.

@Bjarte, recognise a few, they are in with the “#CuntSec” lulz troll crew who attacked her first time around. They proceeded to DoS my website for blocking them…. Mini-anon h4x0rs with a lot of misogynistic tendencies.

I think the bullies making the threats should get community service at the very least, if not county jail time.

recognise a few, they are in with the “#CuntSec” lulz troll crew who attacked her first time around. They proceeded to DoS my website for blocking them…. Mini-anon h4x0rs with a lot of misogynistic tendencies.

IOW, script kiddies that wear V for Vendetta masks, are impotent chimps politically, love to wave anarchist flags randomly at political protests that don’t really do anything, think they’re amazing with a script someone else wrote, and attack us online with rape threats or attack other minorities because they think the big bad government is conspiring to prevent them from being assholes online. The Big Bad Government should conspire to prevent them from harassing people online, and their antics are just more mysog behavior reinforcing the very patriarchial status quo.

If Twitter don’t get to grips with this, it will be left with only angry people and bullies. It’s a bit like a club which has a few people who enjoy abusing other patrons but are not thrown out by the manager. All it needs is someone to open a competing club with rules enforced by staff and a lot of people will go there instead.

twitter is too big to control in such a fashion now. It will burn before there is any systematic control put into place. Indeed, it will become the haunt of the angry and the wanna be powerful blowhards.

It’s inevitable.

On the bright side, just like with most popular forums that end up the same way, there will also just as inevitably be something to replace it.

I tend to agree that there is no plausible way for Twitter to deal with this problem when it gets to a certain level. What solutions are there? Any more restrictive platform would be self-defeating. It is the anarchy and openness of Twitter that makes it attractive.

I sent out a tweet about a minute before I deleted to explain that it wasn’t permanent. Unfortunately, that tweet wasn’t around for long, because I only left it up as long as it took for me to perform the deactivation. Perhaps what I should have done was waited about an hour, for word to get around. Perhaps I should have anticipated that the media would pick it up, that people would start talking about it.

I actually knew this since I read her explanation before it was deleted. For me, however, the most moving part of the blog post, is her account of why she left:

This is what happened to me. This is why I left twitter. It wasn’t because of the rape threats. It wasn’t even because of the police failures – many of which are now being dealt with. It was because of the relentless, exhausting, never-ending policing of my behaviour. The continual injunctions not to react, not to swear, not to shout, not to show emotion. To be quiet. To be good. To take it. Some of these injunctions were deliberately provocative; some of them were well-intentioned, if insensitive and even sanctimonious. All of them were unbearable.

I found this part especially gripping:

A thousand intrusions into my mind. And each new tweet, each new message that told me how to behave, or that my behaviour was unacceptable, added to that. And made me wonder what the mentions of my abusers were like. How many of these people telling me not to swear, not to react, where telling them not to contact me to tell me about the new, imaginative way they’d thought of to violate and mutilate my body. Not many, I suspect – if any. Because it’s easier to tell victims to shut up. Victims are nice, pliable and compliant. Abusers are scary and tough and will tell you to fuck off.